Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) can increase quality of life by improving cardiac performance. Most CRTs rely on a set of parameters that can be optimized according to various criteria. As cardiac conditions change, for better or worse, such parameters may be periodically re-optimized. In general, benefits of CRT increase with frequency of optimization. However, certain cardiac conditions can confound optimization or otherwise make optimization problematic. For example, atrial fibrillation (AF), which often occurs in conjunction with congestive heart failure (CHF), can confound measurement of some delays used in the QuickOpt™ optimization algorithm (St. Jude Medical, Inc., Sylmar, Calif.).
To account for such cardiac conditions, clinicians must understand thoroughly how optimization algorithms function and carefully assess patient information prior to implementing CRT and/or optimization algorithms for CRT parameters. Various exemplary techniques described herein provide a framework to guide clinicians in making such decisions and to manually or automatically implement specialized features to account for particular cardiac conditions.